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Guest Op-ed EPA – Do Your Job

Among the hundreds of
thousands of federal employees furloughed during the record-setting partial
government shutdown, were those responsible for tracking pollution, safety
hazards, and other threats to the American people’s health, safety, and welfare.

EPA was missing
oversight of superfund site clean-ups, along with inspections at thousands of
factories, recycling plants, power plants, and many other facilities.

At the Interior
Department, half the staff of its Bureau of Safety and Environmental
Enforcement were sent home – and these are the folks responsible for preventing
offshore drilling disasters. At the same time, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management brought back furloughed employees early to plan for an
offshore oil lease sale in March – all while EPA was not enforcing the National
Environmental Protection Act that reviews those activities.

Now that they are back
on the job, at least for the next two weeks, the beleaguered federal workforce
is facing a pretty stressful work-overload – and at the nation’s expense.

All this while EPA has
just hit a 30-year low in the number of pollution cases it referred for
criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice.

In addition to rolling
back regulations and rewriting rules to favor polluting businesses, last year
the 166 cases referred by EPA was the lowest since 1988 when Ronald Reagan
tried to dismantle the scandal-ridden agency with Ann Gorsuch at the head.

In 1990, Congress
directed EPA, through the Pollution Prosecution Act, to employ 200 or more
special enforcement agents. Today it has 140.

Criminal violations of
the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other environmental statues used to
result in prison time for those convicted – but not anymore. In 1998, EPA
prosecuted 592 criminal polluters. Pursuit of environmental criminals has been
going down steadily ever since.

And settlements made
with polluters plunged to an abnormally low point in 2017 with only $1.6
billion collected in penalties, down from $5.7 billion the previous year.

While the number of
new civil and criminal cases, defendants charged, and federal inspections and
evaluations have all dropped to their lowest levels in at least a decade,
decisions on prosecution referrals are also being taken away from those closest
to the crimes in EPA’s regional offices, and instead centralized at EPA
headquarters in Washington, DC. This rearrangement allows political appointees
from the oil, gas, coal, and chemical industries to ignore criminal referrals
from the field.

To make matters worse,
EPA staff have been told by managers to step back from enforcement and let the
states take over, essentially giving states veto power over some cases and
injecting local politics into federal prosecution decisions.

As the
Administration’s plan to cripple EPA proceeds unimpeded, polluters are being
let off the hook. With fewer prosecutions, the Administration is sending a
clear and direct signal to industry that they don’t need to comply with the law
because they won’t be prosecuted. This, in turn, provides an incentive to break
the law. Why spend extra money working to decrease emissions or pollution
levels if no one’s holding you accountable? And it creates an uneven and unfair
playing field for the majority of businesses and industries that do comply with
America’s health and safety laws. They are now at an economic disadvantage.

And this is all
occurring while the threat of climate change reaches an all-time high. With
science debunked in Washington, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
recently told the world we have a little over a decade to substantially reduce
heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions to 45 percent of what they were in 2010.
By 2050, emissions need to effectively be kept at zero in order to stave off
the most severe effects of climate change.

The IPCC report is a
red flag, to America in particular, that we can’t afford the roadblocks thrown
up by the White House against any EPA action to curb greenhouse gases,
especially as the US is only behind China in leading the world in carbon
emissions.

EPA is the nation’s
premier public health agency protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink,
and the land we live, work, and play on. At the core of its mission is
enforcement – and that’s not happening, with or without a furlough. And once
you delay or stop criminal prosecution of polluters, you stop protecting the
American people.

Jack Clarke is director of public policy
and government relations for Mass Audubon